“At a Royal Society conference some time after his 80th birthday John
Maynard Smith rose to rebuke a speaker who had alleged that "neo-Darwinian
orthodoxy" said something or other. "It doesn’t, and I know this because I
am the voice of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy," he claimed - and it was
perfectly true. He deserved his position as the grand old man of
evolutionary biology, not just because of the important work he had done
in his prime, but because he never for a moment lost his love of, nor his
interest in, it. At scientific conferences Maynard Smith spent as little
time as possible over the formalities, and as” much time as possible
interrogating younger scientists in the bar about the details of their
work and their theories. He had a hand in the discovery or shaping of some
of the most influential theories of late-20th-century biology.
“JMS helped to illuminate so many areas in biology that it is hard to know
where to begin. By introducing mathematical models from game theory into
the study of behaviour, he showed that the success of an individual's
behaviour often depends on what other individuals do. He introduced the
idea of an "evolutionarily stable strategy": a strategy that, once common,
cannot be bettered by alternatives. This work has completely
revolutionised the way biologists think about behavioural evolution, and
game theory is now one of the most commonly used tools in evolutionary
thinking.”
science
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